Endless contrapuntal tension

"The idea of the polis, in fact, long preceded its full implementation, just as it long survived its political obsolescence. One major key to Greek history during this period is the endless contrapuntal tension between rational progressivism and emotional conservatism, civic ideals and ties of consanguinity, blood-guilt and jury justice, old religion and new secularizing philosophy. It is in this clash which provides the main dialectic underlying Greek (in effect Attic) drama, and which also lurks behind the constant polarization of polis-dwellers into two mutually destructive groups: the Few and the Many, oligarchs and populists, reactionaries and radicals. Cross-currents abounded; the lines were neither clearly nor neatly drawn; but the central dichotomy existed, to form a major, often a tragic, element in Greek political history. Legitimate political dissent was often hard to distinguish from treachery or pure sedition, stasis; and stasis could, all too easily, escalate into bloody civil war. Conservatives praised eunomia as the bulwark of the community; radicals countered with isonomia, equality under the law, the implementation of which produced - according to one's viewpoint - either democracy or mob rule."

- Ancient Greece, A Concise History by Peter Greene, 1973, pg. 64.

Satan covers a gloomy earth with his sombre wings.

"Bad government, exactions, the cupidity and violence of the great, wars and brigandage, scarcity, misery and pestilence - to this is contemporary history nearly reduced in the eyes of the people. The feeling of general insecurity which was caused by the chronic form wars were apt to take, by the constant menace of the dangerous classes, by the mistrust of justice, was further aggravated by the obsession of the coming end of the world, and by the fear of hell, of sorcerers and of devils. The background of all life in the world seems black. Satan covers a gloomy earth with his sombre wings. In vain the militant Church battles, preachers deliver their sermons; the world remains unconverted. According to a popular belief, current towards the end of the fourteenth century, no one, since the beginning of the great Western schism, had entered Paradise."

- The Waning of the Middle Ages, Joseph Huizinga, 1924. Page 21.

Nabokov's House

“If you go to Nabokov’s house, metaphorically speaking, you get his best chair, in front of his fire, with his best wine. If you go to James Joyce’s house, you come into this big drafty edifice, and there’s no one there. And then you find him tinkering around in some scullery. And he offers you two slabs of peat around a conger eel, and a glass of mead. This not loving the reader, that’s the real thing. Henry James fell out of love with the reader. His early stuff, up to about Portrait of a Lady, is full of love for the reader. Then, I think out of sheer disappointment at not getting the kind of audience he wanted, the size of audience he wanted, he fell out of love – it was separate beds, then separate rooms, then separate flats. James never gave a damn for the reader in the first place, partially because perhaps he had patrons and never had to think about it. But it’s not that you want sales or anything like that, it’s that you want to do the right thing by your readers, and you want readers. Because a story is nothing without a listener.”

- Martin Amis.

Borges said of Henry James that "Despite the scruples and delicate complexities of James his work suffers from a major defect: the absence of life." H.G. Wells said that he was "a hippopotamus picking up a pea."

Why I Began To Write For Children

Why I began to Write for Children
- Isaac Bashevic Singer

• "Children read books, not reviews. They don’t give a hoot about the critics.
• Children don’t read to find their identity.
• They don’t read to free themselves of guilt, to quench the thirst for rebellion, or to get rid of alienation.
• They have no use for psychology.
• They detest sociology.
• They don’t try to understand Kafka or Finnegans Wake.
• They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff.
• They love interesting stories, not commentary, guides, or footnotes.
• When a book is boring, they yawn openly, without any shame or fear of authority.
• They don’t expect their beloved writer to redeem humanity. Young as they are, they know that it is not in his power. Only the adults have such childish illusions."

- From his 1978 Nobel banquet speech.

(From the excellent futilitycloset.com)